Author
Topic: Coookieeee (Read 7984 times)

Once again (after several aborted starts and lack of a bass guitar) I have decided to try to make a grind/thrash/death/doom/gore metal album. Being a metal dilettante, I have not mastered the distinctive vocal style colloquially known as "cookie monster" vocals. Would there be any way to approximate this lovely sound through an effects processor?

To stay on topic, if I can figure this out, I promise I will work it into an ambient recording.

Yes, you'll have to growl. But there is something out there that will 'help' - and I unfortunately don't know what it is.

I played a show many years ago (late 80's) at an American Legion or VFW hall or similar - and one of the other bands was more in the death metal vein of things... in the middle of him singing about death and eating dead flesh in a graveyard (or something like that - I do remember "flesh" was a recurring theme...) - his effects unit accidentally kicked off. He went from beefy disturbing growling cookie monster to somewhat rather weenie sounding - and then back again once the effects kicked in.

I've got a couple of techniques here from my own slightly bizarre attempts at making extreme metal.

For death / grind vocals nothing beats actually ripping it out from the bottom of your throat and doing the cookie-monster thing yourself, but personally I only ever managed to get about 20 seconds in before it tickled and i'd end choking/giggling, which isn't very metal at all. A combination of pitch shifter (-1 octave, around 50/50 mix), distortion and hard compression means that you can immediately put less effort into it - although the result is much less effective. I did this quite a lot on my idiot-metal album Thud Is Good, which you can download here: http://www.cutoutonline.co.uk/mp3s/cut004/thud_thudisgood.zip - 34mb

But my top tip is for black metal vocals without ruining your vocal chords. After the Thud album I wanted to move things on and do some more intense black metal style stuff (although tbh at this stage I didn't really know what black metal sounded like, so i imagined it from what i'd read). For some reason inspiration to make this stuff only hit me at about 5am on the weekend so I ended up having to record the vocals really quietly so as not to wake my girlfriend (again, not very metal). The technique I ended up using was to basically whisper/scream the vocals into the mic, but have the gain totally cranked (i've got an EMU 1616m so have soft limiting on the inputs) and then add the usual plethora of effects (pitch/dist/comp/delay) - and i achieved what is quite an evil effect. You can check out the results on this page: http://www.cutoutonline.co.uk/crud/index.htm.

Hi deepspace - sorry for the late reply, just catching up a bit. yes, that is my dog. her name is "Cookie". We adopted her from a PetSmart 2 years ago and she turned out to be the best dog in the world (to us of course). We love her.